Proving a program to be secure down from applying Schrödinger's equation on the quarks and electrons the computer is made of is way beyond our current abilities, and will remain so for a very long time.
Challenge accepted! We can do this, we just need some help from a provably friendly artificial superintelligence! Oh wait...
I've written a post on my blog covering some aspects of AGI and FAI.
It probably has nothing new for most people here, but could still be interesting.
I'll be happy for feedback - in particular, I can't remember if my analogy with flight is something I came up with or heard here long ago. Will be happy to hear if it's novel, and if it's any good.
How many hardware engineers does it take to develop an artificial general intelligence?
The perverse incentive to become alcoholic or obese can be easily countered with a simple rule - a person chosen in the lottery is sacrificed no matter what, even if he doesn't actually have viable organs.
To be truly effective, the system needs to consider the fact that some people are exceptional and can contribute to saving lives much more effectively than by scrapping and harvesting for spare parts. Hence, there should actually be an offer to anyone who loses the lottery, either pay $X or be harvested.
A further optimization is a monetary compensation to (the inheritors of) people who are selected, proportional to the value of the harvested organs. This reduces the overall individual risk, and gives people a reason to stay healthy even more than normally.
All of this is in the LCPW, of course. In the real world, I'm not sure there is enough demand for organs that the system would be effective in scale. Also, note that a key piece of the original dilemma is that the traveler has no family - in this case, the cost of sacrifice is trivial compared to someone who has people that care about him.
Of course. I'm not recommending to any genes to have their host go celibate. I just disagree with the deduction "if you're ceilbate you can't have children, so there's no way your genes could benefit from it, QED".
If your own celibacy somehow helps your relatives (who have a partial copy of your genes) reproduce, then the needs of your genes have been served. In general, genes have ways to pursue their agenda other than have their host reproduce. Sometimes genes even kill their host in an attempt to help copies of themselves in other hosts.
Is the link to "Logical disjunction" intentional?
I was born in May, and I approve this message.
Ouch, I completely forgot about this (or maybe I never knew about it?), and that's a talk I wanted to hear...
Is it possible perhaps to get it in text form?
It's worth mentioning that EFF has resumed accepting Bitcoin donations a while ago.
The web game greatly suffers from the network effect. There's just very little chance you'll get >=3 people to log on simultaneously, and of course, because of this people will give up on trying, worsening the effect.
Maybe we can designate, say, 12:00 AM and PM, UTC, as hours at which people should log on? This will make it easier to reach critical mass.